Afterlife
by stefanie bean
Summary: The journey of the Phantom in the afterlife, after he dies in 1919. 2004 POTO movie. I'm sticking a fork in it, calling it "done."
1. Prologue

---**Author's note**: _Part of this prologue originally came from "Swan Song." _

_The angels Gariela and Damael first appear in "The Man in the Boat."_

_Much credit here goes to director Wim Wenders for his beautiful film, "Wings of Desire," Vincent Ward's film "What Dreams May Come," and to C.S. Lewis for his after-life allegory, "The Great Divorce."_ ---

**Chapter One - Prologue**

Forty-nine years after the great fire of 1871, a cold wind whips around the outside of the Opera Populaire, its vast stone edifice now shuttered and littered with debris. In late 1872 it was rebuilt and rebounded somewhat, until the Great War. Now it remains a decrepit hulk, empty and neglected, awaiting the day of the auction and its final demolition.

"He's sleeping," says the Moroccan manservant, Yasim, as he carefully arranges the covers around your quiet form, the form of a very old man lying still in the bed. When Yasim leaves the room I pull the neatly arranged covers back, take off my wrap, and slip into bed with you. Blind now, your hands reach out and find my face. "Meg," you breathe into my neck.

You still have the strength to roll over, and so you rest your face against my breast, your chest against my belly, but your great heart is no longer strong and steady in the collapse of your chest. It flutters like a bird in a cage, waiting for the day the door will open and it will fly loose and free into the blue, to where I cannot tell and where I cannot follow.

I stroke your face with my hand and remark to myself that nature's humor consists mostly of bitter irony. In the general ruin of age it is impossible to tell that you, who fifty years ago men feared as the "Phantom of the Opera," ever had any facial blight or deformity at all.

My own face is lined and worn too, though my dancer's body has carried me well through sixty-six years. There is almost no remnant of your beauty, unless it be in the strong line of your jaw covered with pouched flesh. Underneath, the line is still beautiful, still discernible after all your eighty-two years.

We kiss gently and then you ask, "Is everything ready?" It is, it has been ever since the auction was announced some weeks earlier. I look at you carefully as I always do before I leave the house, because it is perhaps the last time I will see your face so beloved to me.

Yasim and his brother Ahmed drive me to the cemetery. There I find a small tombstone not so elaborate as the others, but that's understandable, as it was erected during the Great War when we all suffered such terrible privations.

I place on the side of her gravestone a single red rose. A black velvet ribbon fixes to it a blue-stoned ring. This is what you, my husband, have asked me to do. I know the ring well - it is the very one you ripped off a slender white neck during the Bal Masque on New Year's Eve, in the foyer of the Opera Populaire.

It is Christine de Chagny's tomb which you have asked me to visit.

I place my burden down on the cold stone, and a great burden it has been. I reproached you only once for keeping it and thereafter held my peace. Considerately you hid it out of my sight, but the bitter taste persisted all these years.

Your instructions are strange. I am to place the ring on the gravesite, and Ahmed will guard it. Then I am to go to the auction and bet on the music box, the little Persian monkey with the clapping cymbals. I am not to win it, about this you are most adamant. Ahmed positions himself behind a large Grecian tomb as I climb into the carriage.

I don't understand this plan that you conceived on the very day you heard of the auction. As death comes closer to you, I can't follow you or follow what you know, or how you know it. It's as if a veil has come off between you and some other woman, as if one of those great twisting statues at the Opera Populaire has suddenly taken the covering off her face and taught you a tune no one else can hear.

Yasim drops me off at the Plaza, and my heart almost stops in my breast when Raoul de Chagny arrives. Crippled and shaking, he is carried by his servants into the ruined Opera. He does not speak, but his shocked look suggests to me that he has momentarily mistaken me for my mother. His watery, unfocused eyes keep returning to me, and when the auctioneer addresses me by my professional name, "Madame Giry," he peeks at me as if the ghost of my mother herself had appeared to carry him back all those years, to snap him across the back of the hand with her stick.

The Vicomte wants the music box and I let him outbid me. He holds it tight to his chest like a child at Christmas who has finally obtained the toy he longed for all year. I follow him out onto the Plaza, and in a flash of light I know where he is going, what he plans to do with that music box, and what you, my husband, already know.

Raoul nods to me as he leaves, and I briefly nod back. His befuddled look tells me that he is probably somewhat senile and still confuses me with my mother even in the harsh winter light. A mix of gratitude and pity wash over me. I feel pity because his life has been bitter, as the girl he risked so much for turned sad and pallid, whose children fled her cold home as soon as they could. I feel gratitude, because without his intervention you would not lie in my arms every night, with my hand under your neck.

I return home and sit down by your bed as I have for the past five years of your long illness. You ask how it went, as if you need to. I kiss your sightless eyes and feel your heart through your nightshirt, and its wild irregular flutter fills me with anxiety. You know every flick of my every muscle. Gently you stroke my face and consolingly you whisper as if I were the child, or the old man needing comfort in his last days.

There comes a knock and Ahmed enters. He places on the bedside table the very music box upon which I had bid earlier in the day. You raise yourself a little - what effort that requires! and say to Ahmed, "The ring is gone?"

"Yes, the Vicomte took it as you said he would," he replies, and winds up the music box before slipping out of the room.

As the little tune plays, your sightless eyes fill with tears. I place the music box on the bed between us until your recollecting hand reaches out to feel it and play over it. This small effort exhausts you, so you rest your white head back on the pillow.

I straighten the room and draw the worn curtains against the afternoon sun, but you protest. You want to feel the warmth as it plays across your face. Then I hear you call, "Come lie with me," so at once I turn around, and in a moment I'm down to my chemise and in your arms with your head nestled into my neck, your hands on my breasts.

You've wet yourself a little, but I don't care. Yasim can change the sheets later. For now, it matters not to me. Tears, semen, water, blood, anything from you I will take, because when I look at your drawn face, whiter and looser than ever, I know that too soon the time will come when the dust that's left of you will make no more wetness of any kind.

A little light plays around you, perhaps from the afternoon sun going behind the building across the street. Then I am not so sure from whence that light comes, for the music box behind me on the table starts to play, but more softly and slowly than it should. You struggle for breath and I cling to you, my face wet with tears, my chemise wet with your sweat. You have made a little water too, but it's as harmless and innocuous as that of a child, the child I never bore you, and that sorrow comes up again and I sob.

You hold me, stroking me through my quiet cries, like I held you seven times seven years ago. I say to you, "Tell me that you love me," and then you, my great and beautiful trumpeter swan, give back to me your own strong swan's cry, "Yes," and you become very quiet. After awhile you lie trembling in my arms, unconscious.

Then the music stops.

I don't move, or call out for Yasim, or send for the doctor. Gradually the light fades as the life slips out of you, as the great bird of your heart gives up the struggle in the cage of your chest. Then that great cage opens and you are set free forever, flown to where I cannot follow until the day I fly through the sky of my own death, flown soaring up into a blue where there are no shadows, no veils, and no tears to fall behind them.

(_To be continued_.)


	2. Into the Light

**Chapter Two - Into the Light**

Stop, get this boulder off my chest. It's crushing me, splitting my ribs, and I can't breathe. My heart's ripping apart; something's tearing and flooding my chest with blood, choking me. I'm so frightened. Where is Meg? Where is she? I can't feel her arms anymore in the black. I can't move under this weight. Oh, this is worse than the last time, much worse. Something's being pulled out of my chest, long and snaky and full of pain.

I'm being split in two. Where is Meg? Where is her hand around my neck, to hold me down, to keep me here? My blindness was not so black as this. When the sun was on my face a little light came through, and I lived in a haze of grey, sometimes even seeing her shadow.

But this is black, and worse than black. Oh, my love, where is your hand?

There. How did my head come to rest in a lap? I was paralyzed, but now I can make little movements. Cool hands slide over my face, like sun in the winter. Soft like a little bird's, and a voice sings to me. It's sweet, and lifts me up. But where did Meg learn to sing like that? She always said she sounded like a crow when she sang, and I never told her, but she did. Not that it mattered. Meg's arms and her hands on my body sang to me. However, these hands that stroke my brow and lift the pressure off my screaming chest bit by bit aren't hers.

There, two hands, no, four. I go so deeply into black that I go beyond it and out the other side. Oh, hands of love, don't leave me, and though I struggle, Meg's hands are gone, slipped away into the other side of black. I don't know whose hands these others are, but they soothe and calm me. Meg's hands vanish, and now two others are here, hands made entirely of dark. Now my head is in a new lap, cradled in the circle of new arms, and a sweetness like none other in my life fills me.

I should feel terror at this abyss beyond sense, this non-sense where I sit rocked in tender arms. It's like travelling but I don't move. I reach for that light and senseless hand and there it is, lying on my face, on that side at which I never could really look, even after the decades when Meg watered it with tears and kisses and brushed it with her beautiful hair. But this hand isn't Meg's hand. The wrist is wrapped in a dark sleeve like a man's coat, even though the wrist is delicate and the hand feminine.

This new hand on my face keeps me from convulsing in terror. I'm seeing a hand. I'm seeing again. I haven't seen in five years. The light gradually dimmed and faded over that time to flickering grey, but this hand looks more real than a hand ever has. I turn around and I can move, it's amazing. The weight is gone, I can move. I turn and look at her and everything stops.

Her face is old and lined like mine, but shining like a coin in the sun. Pulled back into a severe bun, her hair shines like light itself. Do I know her? Her hands on me seem familiar and I've felt that look covering me, watching with me. Watching over me.

"Who are you?" I ask.

She gives me a look of pure compassion, the one I've been searching for all my life. Meg's tenderness came the closest, but was still nothing like the expression on this stern woman's face. I start to cry but no tears come.

Everywhere I searched for that look - from my mother who roughly pushed me away, or from my father who gave me a few beatings and then was gone. As a prisoner of the circus, I would scan the crowd looking for one face, any face, anyone who would look at me with anything but fascination or disgust. I thought I saw it in Christine's face, but compassion is neither desire nor pity.

Her look pours over me. "Who are you?" I repeat.

"Gariela. I know you. Soon you'll recognize me."

"Where am I?"

"In between worlds," she answers.

I don't hear her voice. Instead, I feel it through me like a musical note, the purest note there is. No fuzz, no vibration, no catching of the breath or hoarseness of the voice. Just pure tones that make me shake with their beauty.

"Don't let me go," I whimper. "I'm afraid."

"I'm here. When you're ready to see, you'll see."

"Don't let me go, please. Something has happened. I thought I'd die with the pain - my chest was bursting - but now it's gone. I couldn't see but now I see you, but nothing else."

"I know. Don't be afraid. I'm here."

So I nestle back in her lap, and as she rests her hand on my hair I'm a little boy in the lap of his mother. I never remembered that from life, but now it enters me - not memory, exactly - but experience. As if I were a glass, and experience were being poured into me. I know what it's like to be held and nursed, the warm breast in my mouth, the tickle of hands on my feet, the soft rubbing of oil onto baby skin. The mouth on my stomach cooing, little boy, sweet little love.

There were hands, and I can vaguely recall them now, hands that did tend me gently, but not my mother's. Thank you, I say to those long-vanished hands. Of course there had to be hands like that. I see that now. How would I have lived otherwise?

"Oh, my poor mother. Did you know her, Gariela?"

"I did, and do."

"I can't hate her anymore."

"No, you can't."

"Rock me. Rock me, as she would have."

Then she does, and I think that no pleasure that I have ever known could come close.

I try to close my eyes but an image comes into focus like a grainy picture developing before my sight. I see Meg holding me in our bed, tears leaking out of her wrinkled eyes. She looks so much older than when I saw her last, but her arms are still so beautiful. Why are you holding that old, dry thing, that rag doll of a man? I want to ask her, and then I know.

I know.

"I've died, haven't I?"

"Yes," Gariela says.

"She can't come with me, can she?"

"We will bring her later. But not just yet."

"I want to say good-bye."

"Breathe on her, then."

My chest works again, and as I breathe out, something bright swirls out of my mouth and around her beloved head like a cloud. She turns her head blindly toward the window and rubs her face. She thinks it's the sun or the wind. She feels me on the breeze but can't see me. Lightly she rubs her cheek, as if I'd just kissed it.

A terrible understanding dawns in my breast - this is how a ghost is born. I pretended for so many years to be a ghost, but now a frightening choice appears before me. Gariela's silver eyes are on me, burning in that face scarred with deep little cuts. I could live here as a ghost if I wanted to. I could haunt the house, move the furniture, and whisper in the corners at night until I faded away into a gibbering idiocy.

Gariela sits, waiting. She has an eternity to wait.

"It's over, isn't it?" I say, finally. "Forty-nine years ago, I walked through one portal and never looked back. I never expected to see Meg there at the end of that corridor, but there she was, and she has been the sun shining on me ever since. It's like that again, isn't it? It's over for me here."

"Yes. A new portal, a new path, a new sun."

"I've been a ghost. It's overrated. Take me, Gariela."

The room fades and Meg's sad face with it. The last gesture I see is her veined and spotted hand moving over my face, fully closing my sightless eyes. Then something blows all around me like a great rustling, and Gariela's hands are on mine once again. Her long black coat ripples in an unseen wind and that's not her hair, it's a corona of light I see all around her. Suddenly I'm afraid again.

"I've done some evil things. Shameful things," I tell her.

"I know everything you've done. I have been with you since before your birth."

"It was you, wasn't it? That night, when I brought Christine down to the cave. You were holding her head when I … Oh, God, help me. You were there. You saw everything."

Then I sit very quietly in the space in between the light and the dark. A dream will fade as the day goes on, but this is the opposite of a dream, for what I recall becomes clearer, like a picture coming into focus. Again I hear Gariela's voice telling me that it wouldn't help, as I played with myself like an adolescent in the dark. Again I feel Gariela's silver tears on my cheek when I cried myself to sleep.

She waits, and there's no place to hide from her tenderness.

"There's no need for shame," she tells me. "Sorrow, yes. Remorse. But not shame."

"There is blood on my hands that won't wash off. There is filth, and lust, and cowardice. Lies, so many lies."

"Yes. But all blood washes off if you first wash your heart. Walk with me," she says, and she holds out her hand to mine.

It hangs there in the air between us. I recognize the gesture. Once I held my hand out like that to a girl, and when she took it everything changed. Had I known how, would I have still held out my hand like that, taken hers in mine and walked down that path?

Yes, I would have.

Gariela stands there waiting, and while her hands had guided me through the doorway of dying, this I know will be different. The temptation to remain a ghost comes over me again, this time stronger. At least I know what being a ghost means. I could stay in our house and see Meg for a few more years until she died. But what would come to me from Gariela's hand, that as I look on it grows brighter and hotter?

"Where am I going?" I ask. "What's going to become of me?"

"You trust me, or you don't. You face your fate, or you don't."

Her hand, waiting.

If I go into the fire, I think, I go in with my eyes open. I don't deserve mercy. But I would like it, even though I gave far too little. Suddenly a great weariness comes over me. I'm tired, tired of the struggle. I just want to rest on my mother's lap and hear her tell me that it's all right. Just once.

"Take me to the fire, Gariela," I say, "or take me to my mother. I can't fight this anymore. Here is my hand, here's everything. I give up. It's really over now."

I put my hand in hers.

A fierce knowledge goes through me. The life leaves the body slowly. I've been caught in the spiderweb of time up till now, as my flesh cooled and faded. But the cord has been pulled and the web lifted. The life of my body is gone, truly gone.

Around Gariela a blinding aperture of light opens, and we go through it together.

(_continued_…)


	3. The Forest of Forgiveness

**Chapter Three - The Forest of Forgiveness**

Something moves through my head like music, and together Gariela and I walk down a path of sound and light that changes and melts before me. I find myself in a little wood where leaves twinkle in the sunlight. Under my feet crackle dry leaves and fragments of twigs. They're soft, and I step experimentally over the forest litter beneath my feet for awhile before stopping in amazement.

I'm standing and walking. I haven't stood on my own power since the day of Christine's death two years ago, but there I stand. I look up to a sky that isn't blue, but white like glowing china, and fresh air plays around me. I look at my hands and they're no longer ropy and twisted with age, but as they were in my prime fifty years ago.

Far away I hear the tapping of a hammer.

I turn around and Gariela's still there by my side, a little woman whose scarred and ancient face pulls me in with love. She gently lets go of my hand and points in the direction of the sound.

"Who's that?" I ask.

"Go and see."

So I walk off toward the sound. As the path curves around, a small boxy frame house appears. In front, a man builds something out of wood with the tap-tap of his hammer, a shelf or something simple. His shoulders are big and substantial, and his long brown hair covers his face. Slowly and deliberately he works, whistling a merry little tune. He hears the crunch on the path and looks up, setting down the hammer. His broad face breaks into a smile and he comes up to me, his arms open wide. All around him shines a rosy light, shimmering behind his head and wide shoulders.

I stop dead in astonishment. It is Joseph Buquet.

The last time I saw him his face was contorted in terror as I wrapped the noose around his neck, and pushed him off the scaffolding to hang and twitch below. I stalked him like a cat and killed him without a scrap of hesitation. Now he stands before me brown and pink, glowing with life. I can't look at him, I'm so ashamed.

He embraces me and it confuses me. What kind of body do I have? What kind is his? For I can feel him, the skin sliding over round muscles, his warm breath on my cheek, heat pouring off his skin.

"Well," he says. "You're finally here."

I gape at him, unbelieving. He's smiling at me with his arm still around my shoulder.

"I killed you, I say. It was a terrible thing to do."

He lets me go and beckons. "Come and sit. I can finish this later."

It's a birdhouse he's building, several simple pieces of wood nailed together, but the glorious shining planks have grain so pronounced I can see each one alive and almost moving.

"May I hold it?" I ask. He places the birdhouse in my hands and I stare at it open-mouthed. "What's it for?"

He looks at me and laughs deep and rich from the belly. "For the birds. I'm a keeper of the birds. And you're going to help me, mate. That's why you're here."

"How can you stand to look at me? I would think you would hate me."

He takes the beautiful wooden object gently from my hand. "I did for the longest time. Would have killed you myself if I could have. But you'll see how it all works. You're all confused and then your head clears. It's in the air. Wonderfully clears up the head."

"I'm sorry," I say. He smiles and nods, expecting me to go on, so I do. "I wanted to hurt Carlotta, destroy her career. I thought if I did it for Christine, she would love me. You were in the way like a dog in the street, in the path of a carriage. I would have run you over in a second."

He replies softly, "I did the same thing, mate. I thought I could make the girls love me when I sweet-talked the poor little things, and cornered them in the corridors and the dormitories. When I thought no one could see."

"It doesn't work, does it?" I say.

"Pointless as hell."

"You seem to know so much about me."

"Well, it's funny," he rumbles. "You learn things here and you're not sure how you do. They just come into your head. As I was working here I found out all sorts of stuff about you and it helped me to see you, how you could do what you did. I can't tell you how long it took, though. Time doesn't work the same way here."

"Where is here?"

"Where you need to be now, mate. We're all where we need to be, here. But we've got a job to be doing, so let's get to it."

His big body glides up without effort and I follow him to the tool shed behind the white wooden house. He spans with his hands and says, "When you find an oak of just this size, chop it down. It will be tough, let me tell you. You'll think your arms and your gut are fit to burst. Then cut off the limbs and bring the log to me. We'll see where we go from there."

He takes an axe from a hook on the wall, hands it to me, and leads me deep into the woods. It's dark and tangled, even though the sky still glows white. "You'll know the right tree when you see it," he says, and then looks me full in the face with love.

Then to my surprise he lays his hand lightly right on my chest, where two swells of muscle I haven't had in decades meet in a sharp crease. A great rush of wind slices through me and it's as if he moves into me, penetrating me with all of his big living presence. I feel the drink in him, clouding his mind and restraint. I see a girl, a child really, crying and terrorized, clutching her bloody ballet skirt around her legs. He glimpses me on the catwalk as Carlotta croaks her way through a bad evening of _opera bouffe_. His thoughts ring in my head as if they were my own, _That's no ghost. It's a man in a mask, and he's caught me out. If I can catch him and kill him, he won't see me anymore. He won't make me stop with the girls. I can hide his body in the cellar. _

Just like me. Hiding, not wanting to be caught. I back off choking. He grips my arm saying, "Sorry, too much too soon, mate. I forget that you have to work up to it, like. But I just wanted you to see. It's not a matter of me being all perfect and you the Judas goat. I've had a lot to be sorry for too. Now off you go to find that tree."

He smiles and waves as he walks off, leaving me alone in the forest with an axe and the gathering green forest dark.

There is no day or night, only the bright white sky, and I scrutinize one tree, then another, until before me as if it called my name stands a tall scrub oak. I hit it with my axe but the tree rings like iron and I barely scratch its bark. I hit it again and again, and after more swings than I can count there's a tiny nick in the surface.

On I go in that time without time, until my hands bleed and the axe starts to slip from them. I tear strips off my shirt and wrap them around my stinging, bleeding hands. Finally the tree falls and I lop off the limbs but they're tough, and each limb fights as I whack at it.

Joseph comes up from between the trees to where I work, and he carries a long saw. I take one end and he the other, and we saw the long log into smaller chunks. I'm so exhausted I can barely move my end, but his strength astounds me. He's almost pushing me and the saw itself, and under his hands the saw goes through the log like a knife through butter. He sees the bloodstained rags around my hands but says nothing.

He pushes, I pull, and then our motions reverse. Finally I stumble and can push no more, so he comes over to me and lifts me tenderly, sitting me down on one of the log sections. Humiliated, I put my head between my knees. "I can't do this," I whisper.

"You can, laddie. You've got to work up to it, is all."

I drag the log sections back to the little white house and pile them up one after another. Then I sit and watch him glue and nail, his face beautiful in soft light filtered green from the leaves. I have no idea how much time has passed and I suffer no hunger or thirst. But my hands bleed and my muscles complain with pain.

He sends me into the forest again to cut more trees, and I move into parts of the forest wilder and thicker than I've seen. He comes out with me to saw, but the job of dragging the logs back to the house is mine and my muscles still complain, although they have gotten harder and stronger from all the effort. My raw and bleeding palms get worse.

One day I come into the clearing near the house, pulling a log so large that all the skin rips off the palms of my hands, leaving the entire surface bloody and ragged. He looks on and slowly nods. I stare at the shreds of skin on my bleeding hands and then bury my face into them. Blood drips through my fingers.

Joseph comes up to me and pulls my torn hands away from my face, holding me gently by the wrists. "Come over to the well," he says. I've seen the old stone well behind the house but he's never used it. He lowers the bucket and draws up water.

"Hold out your hands." He pours the bucketful onto my hands and at once they're full of cool rain, of snow from the mountaintop, of ice from the stars themselves. "Now wash your face."

New, pink skin covers my hands as I dip them into the bucket to splash my face. I feel the same ruts and pitted skin, the same twisting of my eye, but the water soothes it all. I scoop some more water into my hair and then he takes the bucket from me and pours its contents over my head. Shocked, I stare at him. He laughs and I start to laugh, too.

"I think you have enough logs, he says. Now it's time to learn to plane and saw."

He shows me how to strip the bark from a log, how to clamp it and saw it into perfectly straight planks so that the silky grain goes exactly in the right direction. Back and forth I move over the wood. It's easier than chopping or hauling. All my muscles glow with power as they lengthen and thicken over the time that I cannot measure. I still think in terms of days because I still follow a pattern of work, rest, and work again.

In the endless repetition, I don't think or remember much. Instead, I notice that each leaf is distinct, that I can focus on a single leaf at the top of the tallest tree and bring it into focus. On and on this goes until I know every leaf, every blade of grass in the clearing, every knot on the softly rustling trees where we work, and every line in Joseph Buquet's radiant face.

"Now you learn to sand," he says one day, and so I sit next to him, rubbing the coarse paper in circles again and again over the small rectangular pieces of oak until the wood shines like glass. As I look at the grain I can see it almost move, like waves.

"There's a world in there," I say to him, and he just smiles and nods, nailing together another birdhouse.

One day the sky is especially bright and I feel something new. I thirst. "Joseph," I ask, "may I have some water?"

It's as if he's been waiting to hear this, for he leaps up, runs to the well, and dips the bucket in as he did so long ago when my hands bled. He picks up the dipper and I reach for it but he won't give it to me. "No, it's my pleasure," he smiles, and he holds the dipper for me and gives me water as if I were a child and he were my father.

"Tell me," I say after I drink. "Where are the birds who live in your houses?"

"Where tormented children are lost and then found, and given a home. Each one I make is a home for one of those children." He puts the dipper down, and suddenly a pink flame covers him.

"I'm sorry. So sorry."

"It's all right, mate," he answers. "Just keep plugging at it. Don't give up."

The house and surrounding forest glow with the blushing light from his face. A small black figure comes into view through the rosy haze. It's Gariela, holding out her hand once more. "Come with me. We leave this place now."

_(To be continued.)_


	4. The Vineyard of Love

**Chapter Four- The Vineyard of Love**

Through the forest Gariela and I go until forest turns to cultivated fields and gardens, but I see no farmers or laborers. We follow a cedar-lined path to a walled villa. She points to a massive wooden door wrapped in iron and fixed into a high brick wall covered with vines. When I turn to her again, she is gone.

I knock, and when the door swings open a tall and immensely fat man sings out, "Come in, come in, I didn't expect you this soon." His thick black hair falls down around his shoulders in rich curls, and wrapped in his hair are wreaths of leaves and flowers. His belly hangs over a cloth of shimmery white fabric that stretches around his billowing hips. I haven't had a shirt since I ripped mine to rags to protect my bleeding hands, so to me he looks fully dressed in his flesh. He brings me up close to his naked chest, then lets me go, looking at me expectantly.

Instead, I gaze around at his garden. It's an entire expanse, a huge estate, and I don't understand how it all fits inside these walls, but it does. The endless rows of grape vines cling to trellises, the vines themselves choked with thorns that wrap themselves around their thick stems. In the back is a small house with a red tile roof and white plastered walls in the Arab style, and behind it sits some kind of barn or outbuilding. My host stares at me, still smiling. He waits with arms open wide even after releasing me from his wobbly hug.

It hits me, and I sink to my knees. "Piangi," I say. "Ubaldo Piangi."

"It took you long enough, _caro_. Come in and have some wine."

"How can you have me at your table?" I ask. "I tried to kill you. It was through no grace of mine that you lived. I don't deserve your favor."

"In wine there is truth," he says, and extends his huge hand to me, pulls me up effortlessly, and throws a pillowy arm around my shoulder. "I used to be a man who held grudges. Now, no more. Now we drink."

He leads me around the back of the house, where the large shed for making wine sits. His feet are black and violet from earth and juice. His body is huge, but like a bubble or a feather he almost floats on the air. Inside the shed are the gigantic tub, the sieves for filtering, the counters for decanting the bottles, and rack after rack to store and keep safe the vintages. On a sunlit patio a table waits for us with two chairs, a green glass bottle, and two glasses.

"Piangi," I say, hushed and humbled. "Forgive me."

"Long ago, _amico_. Long ago." He pours white wine almost clear as water into the glasses and says nothing, instead waiting for me to speak.

"Do you remember desire, Piangi?" I say, hesitant at first. "I can't remember how it feels, but I can remember what it did to me. Desire, love, lust, I can't tell anymore. All I know is, there you were, an object to be gotten rid of, an obstacle in between me and what I wanted. I strangled you like a farmer wringing the neck of a chicken."

He waits.

"I shouldn't have poked you in the stomach with my sword. I meant to be cruel, to shame you in front of Carlotta and everyone else."

He leans back and his vast bulk fills the large chair. Relaxed and comfortable, he basks in the sun that makes the bricks and his skin glow the same olive-gold. Hummingbirds dart in and out of the vines, stabbing at the bright orange trumpet flowers. I lower myself down into my own chair, swimming in it like a child sitting at the grown-ups' table for the first time. He raises his glass, and I follow. "To truth," he says, "even if it hurts."

I mean to take only a sip, but the whole glassful goes down my throat like liquid gold. Midas, he looks like Midas, turning everything to gold around him, but unlike Midas's golden wine this doesn't sear the throat. Instead, I feel every part of my body coming alive. So that's what bones feel like inside the flesh, with the muscles laid down on them, wrapped up with skin like a present. Decades of married love have made me no stranger to the pleasures of the flesh, but never have I felt so thick, so warm, so heavy between my legs. My muscles, long and hard from the labor of the forest, stiffen with tension and then relax entirely, and I feel each individual one lap the bone beneath it.

"Ubaldo," I say, "I know why I wanted to shame you that way. I made a profession out of hating myself for my face, but I was very proud of my body, so I showed it off. There you were in the limelight where I thought I belonged by right, I went on. At the masquerade ball, every eye gleamed on me with desire and fear as you stood beneath me, fat and ugly. How could it be, that your love stood by your side while mine bore on her breast the sign of another man? I thought my pride in my body could make Christine love me. I was so proud."

He takes another swallow, and fills my glass, grinning.

"What do you do here, Ubaldo?" I ask.

"I bottle the wine that loosens the tongue of love."

"I needed that in life. Was your tongue in life imprisoned like mine, or did it run free?"

"I told my Carlotta she was beautiful often, and meant it. But I did not marry her."

"Why not?"

"She had a husband back in Spain. She ran away from him and came to Paris. I loved her, every day."

"And I tried to take you from her. I am so sorry. It was all so pointless. Where is Carlotta now?"

"She's at the hospital, tending to the very sick."

"The hospital? Where's that?"

"Never mind that now. But back to love … you loved your _carissima_, the little diva."

Down goes more wine, and my tongue runs free. "She was so beautiful, but I never told her so. I wanted to ask her to marry me but the words stuck in my throat. All I did was show off, expecting her to be impressed. Then when I needed to speak to her the most, needed her to reach out to me, I said nothing. All I could do was grope her blindly in the night, without saying anything."

"You were a boy, _caro_. The body was a man's, but the spirit was a boy's. A boy blind with lust, but with a true heart aching for love." He pours me another glass, before the contents of his own slide down into his red, wide mouth.

"Tell me," I say. "After I hurt you, did you ever sing again?"

"No," he softly answers. "You broke my vocal cords. I could speak, but always raspy. To sing was impossible."

I want to weep. How do you weep without tears? Even Gariela had tears, but I have none. Over to his great knee I go, to rest my head on it, and the soft fleecy hairs of his leg brush my cheek. "Tell me what you want me to do."

He takes my head in his great hands and lifts it up, forgiveness and love filling his face. "First you sleep. There's a lot to do. First you rest."

He leads me into the shed, to a rough cot in the corner. My legs wobble but he catches me, and before I even feel the blanket under me I sleep.

No other sleep could be as deep or refreshing as this. I wake up and the same golden sun blankets the courtyard and part of the shed, but not the shadow in my corner. The life moves in my body even more vigorously after my sleep than before. Up I spring, and I see him bouncing over the flagstones. He sings in a lilting language I don't understand, but it must be about the delight of the sun on his body, because he slaps his flesh every so often and laughs at the chorus.

"Time to work," he says, and we head off to the vineyard. A few of the trellises have been cleared, but thorns and weeds choke the rest as far as the eye can see. I touch a thorn experimentally, and a tiny drop of blood forms on the tip of my finger. Like a nettle, it stings.

I see what I have to do.

The first grip around the thornbush fills my hand with pain that shoots straight up my arm. I try to dodge around the sharp points, but they graze my skin anyway. The roots are lodged in deep, and if I pull without care, up will come the vine as well.

I manage to get through a row, lining the refuse in between the rows of trellises. When I finish a row, I pick them up all in my arms, and carry them to the brush pile behind the shed.

At the end, my chest and arms are covered with blood and my pants are torn in several places. That was one row. Now there's another. On I go, the thorns stinging me in a thousand places like fire. My back hurts, but when I squat for a moment down on my haunches, my trousers tear right up the back. Humiliated, I keep on.

Ubaldo comes for me. Back in the shed, he sponges me off and puts oil on my hands and chest.

Then I go out again, and after working row after row, it gets better. I know just where to pull to get the whole weed out, slipping my fingers in between the sharp points. Up the thorn plants pile faster, and as my hands grow practiced with repetition, my attention goes to the grapes themselves. The vines are old and well-established, but the new little grapes have just formed. They're hard and sour still, but can't be disturbed or they'll be spoiled.

Then I notice that not all the grapes are green; some are full in ripeness, and their curly tendrils stretch out and almost grasp my hands as I pass over them. Ubaldo comes and picks these. Soon, he says, I can help him.

My hands grow tough, and my trousers wear to rags. I come in from the vineyard naked, and Ubaldo remarks, "Those trousers lasted longer than I thought. Here, I have something better." He hands me a short white tunic and it goes over my skin like air, as if I'm wearing nothing at all. Back among the rows I notice that the thorns won't pierce it, and even when they stick me hard through the cloth, there's no pain. My hands are tough now, and I can go through a whole row with hardly a scratch.

Ubaldo tells me that it's time for the burning. The brushy, thorny pile behind the shed towers over it now, and he brings a torch. It blazes brighter than a theater spotlight, without flames.

"Wait," I cry. "Won't you burn the shed?'

"The shed has no lust," he laughs. "Why should it be consumed?"

He tosses the torch onto the pile, which erupts into a roaring mountain of flame. In the dancing blaze I see myself hungering after Christine, lulling her into a dream of desire, running my hands over the bodice of her dress, stroking her with my fingers until she writhes on my bed. In that pitiless light I see all the pointless meanderings of my own hands driven by loneliness and despair. There's Meg's sweet face as I plunge into her blindly in the deepest pitch black of the tiny cave where we hid. I search for the kisses Christine gave me, the first kisses ever to grace my mouth, but in the blaze they are nowhere to be found. Then there's nothing but white ash and smoke which gently blows onto me, covering me with a grey scum.

"We have to wash you now," Ubaldo says.

In the courtyard we go to the tinkling fountain. He motions to me to get in and the water seems to leap up over me, to play over my limbs and chest and backside. "Scrub yourself," he orders. "Take your tunic and scrub yourself." The ash dissolves away as I rub over all my skin. I don't want to touch my private parts, private no longer in the warm sun, but Ubaldo gestures towards my manhood. "All of you," and finally when I'm clean he says, "Now you learn to make wine."

We gather enormous baskets of grapes and then he climbs into the vast tub with me. We dance, we squish, we cover ourselves with violet goo until it squeezes everywhere on and around us. He holds the sieve and I press the juice through it. "Save the skins," he says. "This time we make it red."

We mix the culture into the juice, then pour it into great vessels. As it ripens, I wash the bottles of clear green glass and cut corks from the long sheets. Then we're ready to decant the wine into the bottles, and it pours out a dark, rich red that's almost black. There the bottles sit, row upon row, the wine dark inside the green. One bottle, the last, I can't bear to cork. Its smell lures me.

"Ubaldo, can we have some?"

"I never thought you'd ask," he chuckles, and brings the glasses. I smell it before taking it into my mouth. Faint spice mixes with the yeast, and it smells dry. He holds up his glass and we clink them together, lightly, and then down it goes. Dry it is, and fresh on my mouth.

"Sing with me," I say, loud and loose now. "Teach me a song," and he sings an old Italian tavern song that goes on in a circle, and we laugh so hard we can sing no more.

Someone has joined us. It is a bent, shambling man wearing the same dark kind of coat as Gariela, with an old, lined face kind underneath thinning hair. "_Amico_!" Ubaldo shouts, leaping to his feet. "Come have some new wine." Ubaldo and he embrace, and as the shabby man approaches me with his hand outstretched, I know him at once. As he takes his hand in mine, he says, "We're better met this time, aren't we?"

There's a warm space inside me full of light, where shame used to be. Even so, I remember his presence in the black of that night, when Christine slept on my bed, and I toyed with myself in a futile effort to hold back loneliness and despair, deaf to him then but knowing him now. "Tell me your name," I beg.

"Damael, friend of Gariela, and friend to you." Ubaldo bustles over with another glass. I ask the little man, "Gariela, where is she?"

"Preparing the way for the work you have yet to do. Ubaldo, this is magnificent, and will be even more so when it ages."

"Thank our friend here," he beams at me.

"I avert my eyes and fight the urge to weep, but lose. This time when I put my face in my hands the tears do come, real tears that run salty into my mouth. Damael lays his hand on my shoulder and says, "Don't be anxious. There's no more wrong desire for you, not anymore."

Ubaldo fills our glasses and as the last dry and tangy mouthful goes down, I miss the villa already, with its scrubbed white walls and hanging pendulous plants, with its vast rows of vines and the yeasty smell of grapeskin. I haven't even left yet but I take it all in with my eyes, to keep it there before me.

"Tell me, please, my host. What's in these bottles that we've been filling?"

His fat face is serious. "The husband inside the wife, the wife around the husband, tender and generous."

"My Meg would like this wine."

"She drank of it long ago," Ubaldo answers.

The air grows still and when the other two rise, so do I. "God speed you, _caro_," Ubaldo says, and kisses me warmly on both cheeks, his great fat stomach squashed against mine, and I hold his soft flesh hard, not wanting to let go.

"Thank you," I whisper. "Thank you."

Then Damael says, "We must dress you."

"For what?" I've been without clothes so long, I can't imagine putting them on again.

"Not for your sake," he answers, "but for hers."

The ground seems to shake under me. "Where is she?"

"A long, long way away." He hands me a light shirt and grey pants, with a soft cap. "She will think you're the gardener. Don't be alarmed. She doesn't see clearly yet." Seeing me hesitate, he asks, "Can you do this? If not, tell me. There are other visits we can make."

"No," I say. "I'm ready."

(_To be continued._)


	5. One Perfect Rose

**Chapter Five – One Perfect Rose**

Damael and I leave Ubaldo's villa behind us, and we pass through a scrubby, sand-strewn savannah. Boulders dot the horizon and the wind whips grit into my face. We go on a long while without speaking, and then I have to ask. "Why would Christine think that I'm the gardener?"

Sadness creases his lined face. "Some can't let go of their before-lives, and they become ghosts, attached to the places they loved the most. Others want to bring that life with them into this one. They pick together fragments and assemble them, like children who put together a battleship out of chairs and blankets, and think it will carry them on an ocean voyage. But soon the battleship gets taken apart - the chairs are needed for sitting down to supper, after all. The blankets have to go back on the bed. The children protest; they want to play their game forever. But sooner or later, those who live in that illusion begin to break down, and when that happens there's only one place for them. The hospital."

A shiver goes through me at the word. "What kind of hospital?"

"The kind for those who cannot face where they are. Who cannot face what they are. Those who spit on the hand that reaches out to them."

"I knew it," I say. "There have to be punishments here somewhere, don't there?"

"There are no punishments here," he answers gravely. "Only cures, or attempts at a cure. Think of how it was in life. A man is ill and he avoids the physician. The disease grows worse until suffering drives him there. But the disease has spread deep into his vital organs and permeated his being. To remove it means deep cutting, and suffering."

I contemplate his words. "You don't torture people, then."

"From the outside, surgery and torture may look the same. The sufferer may feel the same. But no one is forced to be cured. Even so, the most desperate here undergo it, and embrace the cost willingly."

"What of those who refuse to be cured?"

"We keep them someplace safe, and we wait. Locked in the prison of their own minds, they torture themselves with their own bleak thoughts and mad desires. They know us and see us far more clearly than you. But we never stop extending the hand. We care for them all through it."

"Thus the hospital," I muse.

"Yes. Thus the hospital. I fear for the girl. If she can't come back to herself, it's where she may wind up."

"Please tell me what to do, Damael. Tell me how to help her. Take me to her quickly."

He touches my arm, and with a rush of wind we find ourselves in a city street, bare and strewn with refuse. Paper blows around in the sad air of abandonment. We stand in front of a townhouse once graceful and elegant, but now stained with neglect. A light in the window breaks through a twilight the color of a slate roof left too long without rain.

The door knocker feels heavy in my hand and the hollow thuds ring through the house. A ragged lace curtain covers the door glass. I wait a long time until faint footsteps click on a bare floor. Delicate footsteps, a lady's.

The door swings open and there she is as I remember her. Not quite - her face is drawn and tight, and there are deep circles under her eyes. Then I look at the rest of her and everything stops for a moment. She wears the dress of ivory satin dress I had made for her. It's stained around the hem with a faint tinge of green mold, and torn under the arms.

She absently pushes back her long dark hair with her stained white gloves. "You're late. How can you prune the rose bushes when it's almost dark? And why haven't you gone around the back? It's impudent for a servant to come to the front door."

I remove my cap and step into the parlor. Thin white sheets cover the dusty furniture and mirrors. "I'm not the gardener."

She doesn't seem to hear me as she wanders absently into the other room. "Go cut some roses for me," she orders. "Company will be here in half an hour."

I walk through to the kitchen empty of everything except a few broken plates and cups strewn on the countertops, and go into the garden. Roses cover everything, roses of every kind. Climbers scale the fence, and bushes with tea roses sit in clumps. Their vast profusion makes a thicket of thorns around the back of the house. Enchanted, I walk out into their midst and then feel her behind me, without turning around.

"Why won't you cut my roses?" she says with a hint of a whine. "Here are the shears."

I take them and go over to a bush of long-stemmed reds, and cut one off. It's the first perfect rose I gave her, when she made her debut in the Opera chorus. She was just sixteen then, a long beautiful swan. Never has the color red looked so full, so real. I put the shears in my pocket and turn back to her.

She strains in the dim light, almost recognizing me. I hand her the rose and she backs up a little, anxious and afraid. Something like a mouse skitters across the kitchen counter, but it has too many legs and too long a snout.

_Damael_, I call out in my mind. _Help me_.

His presence comes to me. _She is free to leave whenever she wishes. Just be kind. Be gentle. Forgive her._

I anguish. _I never understood why she did the things she did. I don't understand now._

He soothes me, _You have some things to say to her. You'll know what they are._

Warmth falls on my cheek like a kiss, and I follow her as she carries her rose. "Christine," I call to her softly. "Christine."

She turns, confused. "You can't be here. I'm dreaming again. So many dreams, and all I do is look for you, down halls and through tunnels, and I never find you. And where's your mask?"

"I haven't worn a mask in almost fifty years, when I was alive. I have no more need of masks."

"When you were alive?" she says in a daze.

"Christine, do you know where you are? Do you know where we are?"

She ponders, then says, "What a foolish question. I'm at home, in our Paris townhouse. Tonight we're having a party. Can't you see I have decorating to do? I thought at first you'd come to take care of the flowers. I must have flowers around me; they're the only things that make me happy. Why are you here, anyway? You don't want Raoul to see you. It would make him terribly angry to see you." She stands in front of a tall mirror and plays with the dust cloth, whimpering, "It's so hard to keep everything clean. The servants all leave, one after another. My son won't come to help, or even visit. Oh, he'll come if his father asks him, but not me. Why does my son hate me?" she asks, her eyes wide and distracted.

"I don't think he hates you," I say. "It's all too late for that."

"What are you talking about? You never spoke to me that way before. Your words were always beautiful, poetic. Not like this."

"Christine, please let me talk to you. Please sit down and listen to me."

She wanders into the living room but won't sit on the cotton-covered sofa whose arm she absently strokes. "Do you think I should get these chairs reupholstered? The fleur-de-lis pattern is so overdone."

"Christine," I beg, standing directly in front of her. "Please, Christine." I don't touch her, because she can still be frightened, and I have frightened her so much already.

Her eyes focus, and for the first time she sees me, really sees me. They grow wide and dark and she staggers over to one of the mirrors. "Why have you come?" she says breathlessly. "I thought you were dead. Then I found out you weren't. Then it turned out you had married my best friend. How could you do that?"

"Christine, you married someone else too."

"But I didn't want to," she wails. "Nothing seemed right. None of it was right."

"No, I agree. It wasn't. That's why I'm here, to make amends. To tell you I was wrong."

She moves over to the window and draws the filthy, ragged curtain aside to reveal the dark, deserted street below. "Raoul should be home soon," she says in a dreamy sing-song. "I used to imagine you'd come here, late at night when the servants were asleep. I used to think you'd take me away. But you never came for me. You never came."

"I had a wife, and work. You had made your choice."

"But how could I have had any choice?" she cries, whirling around, chased out of her dream. "That choice was not free. I never knew who you were. You never showed me. How could I choose an unknown?"

Then a great wave of sorrow pushes me under and fills my lungs, and the pain in my hands from hauling logs, the pain in my skin and limbs from pulling thorns, can't even come close to it. It is like the pain of dying all over again, but it lasts far longer. It's as if my flesh were being squeezed in a giant spring, twisted and compressed to the break of tearing. "You're right, I say through the agony. "Calling me 'false friend' as you did was a kindness. When you said that I deceived you, you spoke the perfect truth. I lied to you from the very start."

"I was singing in the chapel," she says, and then she starts a slow, soft chant, "_Te Deum laudamus_ …"

"That was when I noticed you for the first time. That's when you heard me for the first time, and it was really me, not your dreams or imagination as when you were a child. You were fifteen, and so sad. You were trying to light a candle, but it kept going out. When you finally got it going, you burned your fingers and I wanted to kiss them."

"_Te Dominum confitemur_ …"

"Then I started to sing with you," I went on. "You stopped, terrified when you heard me. I told you not to be afraid; I'm the angel of music, sent by your father. I told you I would make you a great singer. I told you everything but the truth."

"_Te aeternum Patrem_ …"

"Then I let you go on believing it, even when it made no sense anymore. I had promised, and if all hell had to be let loosed, I would deliver. What I didn't expect was that you would ask for me, that you would actually want to see me."

"_Omnis terra veneratur_ …"

"I thought if I taught you to sing, gave you triumphs on the stage, if I touched you and gave you pleasure, if I forced roles to open for you and helped you in your art, that you would be mine. All mine, as if you were an expensive toy from the shop that I purchased with my own blood. All that desperation, all that anger, all that destruction started from a lie."

She falls silent, then comes over to me. A mad thought passes through me, we have done this before, we've been through this before. She can't do this, it's not possible. It would annihilate me entirely with pain.

But she doesn't kiss me. She just leans her head up against my breast, under my chin, and even though I feel my bones twist and break, I put my arms around her. Enfolded there I see the little girl, left at home while her father played at concerts and went to parties afterwards. I see the money dribbled away on corsages and cigarettes, and a young girl left with no inheritance or prospects, taken in by strangers, saved from the orphanage.

In her loneliness she built a choir of angels to keep her company, and in the sadness and confusion of her mind they did speak to her as she grew up. After my lie, she held a secret to her breast, she who had nothing but a dormitory bed and some cast-off costumes, and it made her feel special, more than just another girl in the row of dancers.

For years when I fell to silent brooding, Meg would look at me and know my thoughts without asking. She could see the churn of the bitter question over and over, Why? Why? She never spoke of it to me, but she knew.

Poor Meg, to suffer through that, and never to complain.

Now, if I wanted to I could press my forehead to Christine's, force myself into her soul, penetrate her with glowing power, and discover the why that haunted me for fifty years in life. But what if she herself doesn't know? The tight spring of agony relaxes. It's not important. Then what is? What does matter is compassion in the face of what I don't understand. What matters is my compassion in the face of her pain and bewilderment.

Then the spring squeezing me breaks entirely, and my bones are free. I no longer care why she unmasked me on the bridge, why she kissed me with such passion in front of the man she was to marry, why she came back to tear at me once again with that ring. I don't even care to know whether she really loved me or not. It doesn't matter anymore.

All that matters to me is that she linger no longer in this ruin of a house built of the cobbled-together fragments of her old life. I don't want her to go to the hospital.

"Christine," I say as she nestles into me like a child welcoming her father home after a long absence, "let me help you build another house. Let me help you find another garment. Let me serve you another cup than the bitter and selfish one I prepared for you so long ago. Let me make it better, because the weight of my bitterness has helped to keep you here."

She pulls herself away from me and slowly, one after another, peels off her dirty gloves. Her fingers are long and delicate in the dim light. I hold out my hand to her as I did so long ago. Now, instead of leading her straight into my possession, she puts her hand in mine and I lead her out into the street. From the edge of that gray town we walk into thickets full of flowering bushes and trees. The town fades and the light grows brighter. Here the trees are ancient, tall and straight, with grass dense as moss beneath them. I hear water and she follows me trustingly toward it like a child.

There in the center of wide and arching trees is a small grotto, and from the rock itself bubbles a small spring. Moss and vines overhang the rocks, and the air rises off the water fresh and cool. It's as if an old quarry was once here. Stones of all sizes lie around in rugged heaps.

"Here," I say. "We'll build your house here."

She looks at the water longingly. "What an exquisite pool. I feel so grimy, without a bath in ever so long. Is it all right? Do you think it's allowed?"

"Everything is allowed here."

She goes over to the spring and takes off her dress to show her long, lovely nakedness. Inside me is a space where lust once lived, but now all I find there is praise for that sleek beauty. She bathes herself with quick, delicate movements and washes her dress as well. When she takes it out of the water to wring it, it's no longer the stained, molded remnant of my wishful thinking, but a long soft tunic of pale blue.

"That's so much better," I say. "Now we collect stones."

"Let me help."

So on and on we gather stones, and break them on each other into flat pieces. We mix mud from the well with sticks and gravel for mortar. When her hands bleed, I bathe them in the spring. When she falls down, I pick her up and we continue. Slowly the walls grow stone by stone. Then come the windows, open to the soft breeze.

Once in the woods, when we're gathering wood, we find a long strong saw with a blade shining like a jewel. I wonder if Joseph Buquet left it there for us. It makes the work go so much faster.

We gather the long rushes and dry them in the sun, then weave them into thatch for the roof. The best rushes are rough and coarse, and her fingers first bleed, and then toughen as she works them. We lay the roof and secure it, and the house is done. She makes a broom of twigs to sweep the floor, and I fashion a cot for her from boughs, laid over with a mat of soft dried grass tied into a bundle.

Then we go down to the spring together and bathe, first her, then myself. I submerge myself entirely in the pool, and it's as if all the waters of the deep pass over my head and face. When I come up and wipe my face with my hands, I stop in shock.

My fingers go up and down the entire right side of my face like soldiers out on reconnaissance. There's hair over my right ear, and an eyebrow. The flesh around my eye feels smooth, as does the cheek. My hair is thick and soft, not the coarse mat that I've always had. Slicked back with water, it dries quickly in the even white light.

I look down into the water, but although it's clear as polished glass, the surface casts no reflection. A strange wonder fills my body from the center outwards, but I say nothing, not wanting to break the spell, not wanting to find it to not be true. Sitting in cool water up to my neck, I wonder why, after all these years of my life, and all of what I have seen and done here, I should find myself so restored. I accepted my face, finally, as my life went on. In this strange country, it never occurred to me to want it changed. Yet here it is beneath my fingers, symmetrical, healed.

Christine calls to me and comes out to the fountain. "Come see what I've found inside."

I rise out of the water, coming toward her, and she stops cold in my path.

"Your face," she says. "Oh, your face. If you could see it."

"What is it?" I say slowly, although I know.

"Oh, mercy. It's all the same now." Then she looks very small and sorry, and says, "I shouldn't have taken your mask off when you were writing your music. I shouldn't have pretended to stay unconscious. And when you touched me, I should have opened my eyes."

I stare at her, and for the first time when we look at each other, we really see. I take her left hand in mine, to kiss the spot where for a few moments so long ago a ring once rested. Then I know what she did. I know what she gave up for me, and why she almost found herself in the hospital. On my breast I place her hand, saying, "I know now why you gave your ring back to me." She sighs, and I go on. "It wasn't just a token. It really was a piece of you."

Onto her own breast, where the skin is like ivory velvet, she places my hand. Inside flails the woundedness of her heart.

I see her climbing my stone stairs in her dripping wedding dress, the ring clenched in her fist. I hear her pray to gods that were old when the Cross came to her pine-covered northern land. She begs them to send some of her own living substance into the ring, to bathe my black and bleeding soul with it, and thus save my life. I feel the hole inside her that remained, and the piece of her soul that now beats inside my own.

That piece was hers, I know now. It's time to give it back, and so I do.

Into my own breast I plunge my hand, and with a great wrench of pain I rip something out of me, thick and red, with bleeding roots of agony that drip onto the ground beneath us. My heart has been drawn and quartered, and while three of the pieces are mine, the fourth I pluck out for her. It's the color of her first perfect rose, and she stares at it with fascination as it quivers before us on my palm.

"All you gave up for me lies here in my hand," I tell her. "I became a man of solidity and life. You became the ghost, didn't you? Can you forgive me for how much I made you suffer?"

"I would have given more," she says.

The piece of my heart that is Christine's twitches like a live thing, and smears my hand with blood like liquid roses.

"Will you put it back in me?" she asks.

"Of course I will," and then plunge my hand into the tender flesh of her soft left breast. She cries out, but not with pain. Her eyes roll back in her head, and I've seen that look before, in her deepest throes of passion.

Hesitating, I pull back a little, but she says, "No, go on, it's all right, oh please, go on." The opening doesn't bleed. Her ribs part of their own accord, and with my other hand I slip the quivering living fragment of her soul back into her chest. She gives a little moan of pleasure and looks straight at me, eyes wide.

"All that I missed having with you," she says with a hint of sadness.

"It was my fault," I reply. "I drove you away with murder and jealousy and rage. Never did I know what you did for me, how much of your own joy you set aside so that I might have mine."

With a deep low cry she pushes my hand into her chest a little further, and the newly-inserted piece melds with the glistening ablated organ in the velvet box of her chest. Through her translucent skin her completed heart glows with a warm red light.

"Go ahead, it's all right," she says, and I know at once what she wants me to do, what she will allow. My hand is large enough to encircle her heart completely, and so I do. Its pulsing wholeness glows like a little sun at the center of a galaxy of strong flesh, my flesh.

"Oh, sweet man," she sighs, and her shining gazelle eyes flow over me.

With a glance I invite her into myself. "You can do the same. You don't need to long hopelessly for me anymore. Feel my heart. Feel the part of you that's carved into it forever."

My breast lies open from when I retrieved the shining quarter of her heart, and into it she slides her own slim-fingered hand. I gasp with pleasure as the ribs part to her search. It's hard work for her to penetrate the thick mass of fascia and muscle, but eventually she gets through. As her hand slides through me I shiver with tough fibrous delight. My heart gives a massive, spasmodic flutter as she seizes it, reluctant to surrender.

Tenderly she holds my soul until the wild flailing dies down, and for the first time I truly lose the boundaries of time. We might have stood there ten minutes. We might have stood there ten thousand years. Everything that she was, everything that she is, rests in my hand, and everything of mine rests in hers. We envelope and are penetrated; we penetrate and are enveloped, hand to heart, heart to hand, breast to breast.

When I first died, Gariela poured into me the full measure of a mother's love. In our trembling hands our hearts beat into each other the rhythms of an entire lifetime of shared love, a lifetime that never was ours in the flesh, but whose substance we now both feel.

"You have to find him," I say to her, and she knows at once what I mean. "Show him all of you that he missed. He loved you, but he never really knew you." Then from her fingers the glowing center of my being slips, and I shiver with pleasure as her hand slowly, wetly withdraws. She pinches the flesh of my breast closed like a mouth full-fed.

Her whisper echoes through my whole body, "Cover me, close me up," and the core of her life slides out of my grasp. As I press the open lips of her flesh together, the edges join themselves onto the seamless plush of her soft breast. A verse comes to me that I have not thought of in many years, "_A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed_."

"Forgiven," I almost sob. "Sister of my heart, we're both forgiven." I hear the sharp sweet cries of birds calling to each other from the treetops and once again feel the earth underneath my feet. Under my chin her head rests, and since she's trembling, I smooth the soft curled silk of her hair to soothe and gentle her.

When she's calm, she stirs and takes me in her slender hand, saying, "Come see what's in the house."

We go in, and on the rough log table is a green wine bottle, two clay cups, and a few pieces of flat crusty bread.

"It's Ubaldo's vintage," I say.

"Ubaldo Piangi?" she exclaims. "You've seen him?"

"I stayed with him and pulled thorns from his vineyard. He showed me how to make wine. This is a red, so maybe it's what I made."

But it isn't; it's a sweet red instead of a dry, and far lighter in color. It coats our tongues like honey and we talk on and on, remembering. The wine lightens our hearts and the words flow freely between us. We break the bread and eat it, and the bread and wine fill up the yearning, evacuated space within my breast.

"Bread for the journey," I say.

"You're leaving?" she asks.

Suddenly I know I must. "But someone is coming to see you, a friend."

We go to the spring and wash the cups and bottle. Through the clearing Damael approaches, his kind shabby face nodding in approval at the little stone house. He greets us warmly, and says to me, "Your path goes through there." I look up and there's a clearing through the woods, directly on the path of his approach. "Follow the path until it ends, into the great city. Are you ready for the final leg?"

I nod, and then Damael holds his hand out to Christine. "There's someone we go to see," he says to her. "He has been waiting for you a long time."

"Will we meet again?" she says to Damael, but she looks directly at me.

"You're never apart now," he tells her, and her face relaxes. "There are no more partings, no more sorrow, no more regrets. You'll come to see."

She takes his weathered hand and the two disappear into the greenwood mist.

(_To be continued_…)


	6. The Bright Body of Love

**Chapter Six - The Bright Body of Love**

I am entirely alone in the little clearing with the stone house. I lean my head up against its rough wall and know that it's time to go. An odd excitement fills me, as if everything up till now has been a dream and I'm just on the verge of waking. As if I've been in a play, on stage or backstage, and am about to walk out into the street.

The forest clears, the fields and gardens spring up, and as I travel on I see the workers, the dressers of vines, the tillers and pruners and planters. They wave and I return the gesture. Into the city I go, but twilight no longer looms. Instead the pink dawn covers everything with an icing of coral light. People mill around and smile at me, but no one speaks to me, and I move on as if in a dream. An excitement like love fills me, and my heart presses on me with happiness.

The streets grow wider and more elaborate. I know this place, where is it? It's on the tip of my mind, it's so familiar. Then I come to a great plaza. In the center sits a finely wrought building, many stories tall. I look up, and on the top stands a figure too bright to see, as if a piece of the sun himself stood up there with wings unfurled.

The path ends at the steps that lead up to the great edifice's wide golden doors. On the steps sits a flower seller. Her rust-colored hair is streaked with grey, and it falls loose over her vermilion-clad shoulders. The basket in her lap overflows with pink and white sweetpeas. Her lined face glows like a torch, giving off light that reflects off the marble stairs. I go to her and bow before her, prostrating myself at her feet.

She places a hand on my shoulder, raising me up. "No," she says gently. "Not to me."

"Who are you, Lady?" I breathe.

"I am she who holds the bright Body of Love within her body," she answers as she fills her hands with blossoms. Handing them to me, she says, "For you."

Into my hands they fall and, as if they had a life of their own, they arrange themselves into a crown of flowers. I put it on my head and then she stands up, clutching her roseate cloak and beckoning me to come with her. Her greying hair falls over her shoulders, and I can tell that once it was red, very red, long and ringleted, and it covers her like a queen's mantle.

"I know this place," I say.

"Of course you do."

Around the plaza all roads lead to this vast and beautiful temple.

"It's the Opera Populaire," I whisper.

"That was but a shadow," she said. "This is real. Come and see."

We mount the steps to the wide door. Written on it in letters of fire is my name, my full name. Below my name is a mirrored window like a porthole, but I can't see through it. Instead, I see my own face shining like a coin in the sun.

"Open it," she says, her face bright with love.

"I can't," I answer. "I can't go through that door, or even touch it. There are still so many I haven't seen, so many with whom I haven't reconciled. All those people burned and trampled in the fire. The ones who lost their positions when the Opera closed. Carlotta. Raoul. Especially Raoul. All the ones I've wronged."

"Behold, beloved," she says, as the door opens of its own accord. "Go within and find the bright Body of Love."

I walk into a light fiercer than any I have ever seen. A wind behind me slams the door shut, and I find myself on a rose-red seashore. Large red rocks cover the shoreline and the violet-blue waves crash. Up ahead I see a big wooden house with gables and a front porch that wraps around the whole front, facing seaward. A figure on the porch stands up and waves to me, then runs down the stairs and down to the beach. Other figures, little ones, move or dance about, jumping up and down.

Oh, unbelievable. Oh, majesty, I say to myself, as I break into a run.

She flies to greet me, her blonde hair blowing in the wind, longer than I have ever seen it. Then her sweet face comes into view, her chin pointed like a flower, her eyes bright and merry.

I stop, not knowing what to say or do. Behind her trail six or eight little children, and they dance and squeal. We stand for a moment and look at one another, not believing what we see, and yet believing it, all of it.

"Meg," I say. "You're … you're my age. We're the same age," and first she laughs, then I, because never would I have imagined that would happen.

Then she comes to me and puts her face up against my chest, and I feel her open yourself entirely. "Come in, my love," she says, and down into her I go, deeper than I ever have gone into her with my body when we lived.

"I wish I had loved you more in life," I murmur. "Forgive my bitterness."

"My love. My love. You gave me everything, she says. You let me stay with you. Feel the arms of my soul. Look at the beautiful flowers on your brow. Do you know what sweetpeas mean in the language of flowers? They mean pleasures, endless and eternal pleasures. Forever."

Then we withdraw, and the sweetness almost overwhelms me. I fall to my knees in the warm sand. The children come up to me. I sit in a sandy hollow and a little boy crawls into my lap. "Who are they?" I ask.

Meg joins me on the sand, and they're all over us now like puppies. There are seven of them.

"They're little ones who died before they drew their first breath," she says. "The love, the childhood they missed on earth, they have here. We've all been waiting for you."

I stand up and pick up a little one in each arm, a tiny boy and girl with sweet, serious eyes. The others cling to Meg and I, or run ahead of us towards the gabled house with the porch of its arms standing open wide.

"Come on," I say. "Let's go home."

Moving light covers us as Meg and I lie down together in our bedroom in the wide-gabled house on the edge of the amethyst sea.

"So you know Gariela," I comment.

"For ever so long," she answers. "I knew her at once from the afternoon that you died. I thought I was going mad at first. You were in my arms, limp and cold, and then you were someplace else. I couldn't see you but I knew you were there, and there was someone else with you, too." She dusts my side lightly as her hand runs all the way down my flanks, so that a soft purring warmth starts up inside me. "I saw Gariela in the nursing home, too, when they kept giving me those transfusions and injections that hurt so much. She held my hand and cried with me. Then when I really did die, she held me in her arms. You know what it's like."

"Yes, I remember. She was there for me too. She held me at her breast as if I was an infant. I was a baby all over again, a baby in its mother's arms."

"My love," Meg says, "I've waited for you for so long." Her golden hair flows like silk between my fingers. It's been decades since her hair has looked like this. Not that I didn't love it even when it was coarse and gray, but this aureal satin sheet delights me.

"But we're in heaven," I whisper, or at least what feels like it. "I thought there was 'no marrying or giving in marriage.' I thought we were supposed to be like the angels."

She reaches out to hold me, but I withdraw. I remember the huge onrush of feeling when Joseph Buquet put his hand on my chest, and the sensation of being lost in her when she embraced me on the beach. It was overwhelming to hold Christine's living heart in my hand. I can't imagine actually entering Meg's body. The thought terrifies me, and yet opens me up wide inside, with a great thrumming possibility of love.

Meg smiles reassuringly. "Don't be afraid. Gariela's told me about all that can happen. All that we can have."

"Didn't I lose all lust in Piangi's villa?" I ask. "There was a fire, and I saw it all burn up in the flames."

"You lost the selfishness," she says. "You're still a man, and I'm still a woman."

She laughs and the living light dancing around the room laughs with her. The soft gauze curtains around our bed float of their own accord. Her words are tender as she breathes them into my ear, "These are our bodies now. Don't worry about the ones that have long since turned to dust. Oh, there's not marriage as we understood it on earth, with toil and jealousy and frustration. Not that ours was like that," and she laughs again.

"Don't flatter me too much," I reply. "You used to cry at night when you didn't think I heard you, when your feet ached from dancing two shows in one evening. When you came home exhausted I made you stay up and read my librettos. I hated working as a concert violinist and never failed to mention it, ignoring your own sore and bleeding feet. Then when that boy from Berlin fell in love with me, you went wild and I couldn't blame you."

"Oh, my love," she sighs. "You know what was worst?" and I look up at her, not deserving her, not deserving any of this. "What was worst was when you used to write something you didn't like, and then throw the inkstand. India ink is not the easiest thing to get out of a Turkey carpet. But all that's behind us. There are marriages, and more marriages, the deeper in we go, even to the deepest point of all. All marriages come from the One Marriage. I don't begin to understand it."

"Close yourself to me. I want to hold you, but I fear too much coming in too soon."

"Come here, my love," she smiles, and into her warm beautiful arms I slide. Instead of an onrush of memories and sensations, there's blind sweet warmth and quiet. My head rests on the hill of her breast where my mouth has grazed so often, and she strokes my hair gently.

"There's something inside me," I tell her, and she nods, understanding. "It's a kind of humming, a power I've never felt. I'm going to burst into flame, but it's a cool flame, if you know what I mean. As if I'm the wick of a candle burning with a flame that won't consume me."

"A flame that can burn forever," she whispers. "I know what that is. I've felt it a long time, waiting for you to arrive."

"Meg, can we feel desire? Is it right to feel it?"

"Nothing is wrong here. If you want to you can feel it. If you don't want it you can keep it at bay."

"What if you want it, and I don't?" I ask, remembering one of the acute sufferings of married love. "Or if it's the other way around?"

Smiling, relaxed, she stretched out on the bed. "Then we wait until the other one does. We have all the time in the world."

I lie on my back and look at the ceiling, all convoluted and folded like the petals of a shiny ivory flower. I don't understand this house, I think, so much bigger inside than out, whose rooms don't conform to the outside dimensions. "Can you tell what I'm thinking? Can you sense my thoughts?"

"Only if you decide to let me in. So normally, no. But whatever you were just thinking, it must have been amusing."

"It occurred to me," I say, "that I haven't lost my desire for everything to be in proportion, to fit. So I've been thinking about and studying this house's odd proportions. I still want to build and measure and it's strange, for the first time since I've been here I want to compose. I haven't seen a single instrument, and the only music I've heard has been that of the birds, or singing, but I could, I know it."

"Of course. You're still yourself. I'm still me. I dance with the children all the time, and the music that we need just comes to us from out of the sea."

"From the sea," I muse.

"You'll hear it, and it will amaze you. It's like this. The fundamental parts of us don't change. I'm still a dancer, and you're still an architect and a musician. It's natural to want those things. We still have our gifts that were instilled in us, that we were born with. So we still want to work, to build things, to create. We can and we will."

"Speaking of the children, where are they?" I sit up, suddenly concerned.

"Off playing, or swimming in the ocean riding on the sharks, perhaps. They also like to go off into the woods over the sand dunes. There is a whole flock of other children in the houses on the other side of the woods and they all roam in a band through the countryside. But they most love the ocean with the sharks."

"The sharks?"

"And the dolphins," she comments. "The sharks and dolphins play together. The children ride them, like Christine and I used to ride the little ponies during our summers in Wales."

She sees my shocked expression and beams at me, "Oh, my love, there's nothing that can hurt them. If they need us we're here. That's what we're here for. That's what they need us for, just to be here." But it's not the mingling of shark and dolphin that startles me. It's that she can say Christine's name so lovingly, without pain in her eyes.

"I always thought of children as trouble," I say, hoping that it won't hurt her, forgetting momentarily that she's beyond hurt.

"I know."

"I wanted them because you did so badly, and I knew how terribly it hurt you when we had none, but secretly most of the time I was glad. Men in the orchestra pit would talk about their wives' sickness and weakness, or joke about sleeping on the sofa for months. Meanwhile you and I always shared a bed. The intimacies of the theater could be unspeakable at times but I sat through it silently, just listening, sickened and fascinated by what I heard. Mostly though, I didn't want to share your time or your attention with children."

"I knew how you felt, not directly, of course. In a lot of ways you were like a child yourself, weren't you?"

"That I was," I admit, and then something occurs to me as I lie down again. "The children here … will they grow up?"

"Most do. Some choose to remain children, for how long I don't know. Perhaps those grow up eventually, too."

Lazily she strokes my face and the humming inside me grows more intense, like hundreds of strings all quivering under the bow at once, honing in on the same note that slowly rises in intensity.

"Do you remember the last time we made love?" she asks.

My memories sit like hundreds of thousands of little jewels arranged in velvet boxes, all neatly categorized. They don't weigh on me if I don't focus my mind on them, yet if I want one all I have to do is reach over and pull it out, to lift and examine.

This one's dull and black, a rough sapphire with a faded, dim star. It was in our last two decades that the seventeen years of age difference between us grew most bitter. I was in my early seventies, and already nursing the sickness that would rob me of my sight some years hence. Her monthly cycles stopped but her appetite for love remained, and I disappointed her so many times, even though she never reproached me.

Every endearment, every caress brought me only to a vague, half-erect state. Then before she could come to her crisis I flopped out of her, a useless old man, and it was only after I left our bed in shame that she released her tears. I heard her crying and came back, tried to pleasure her by touch, but she pushed me away, saying _No, no, it's not the same, it just makes it worse, don't you think I've tried that? Oh, just hold me, I feel death breathing down our necks_, she cried, and so I held her, and continued to hold her through the years that remained, even though my flesh never rose for her again.

"I do remember," I reply. "I grew old so much sooner than you."

"Share your memory with me," she asks, and so I do, as in my mind I hand her the dull little gem, and tears come to her eyes, silvery tears like those on the faces of the angels. I kiss them away and they're sweet, not salty. Something thunders through my body like the hooves of a horse wanting to charge unbridled across the fields, but I don't release the reins, not yet.

"I remember the first time, too," I tell her. "This is all that was left of it after Piangi's fire, where we burned the all the brush I pulled out of his vineyard," and from another box I take a tiny diamond, so dark that it's almost navy blue, barely a speck but bright as the flake of a star, and I present it to her at once so that she can share it, too.

When we immerse ourselves in the memory together, it's as if I'm there again. The utter and unrelieved blackness of my cave hideout covered us entirely, and yet I can see us in the darkness. The lust that overwhelmed me when I woke in her arms no longer has the power to batter me since it's been cooled and purged. Her head rested heavy on my chest. Her hand in sleep randomly stroked my belly so that I groaned against my will, but she didn't wake. When she finally stirred, I could feel her complete surrender, and knew that she would give herself to me, without reservation.

I once watched a diamond cutter in Morocco who took lumpish, uninspired stones from Afghanistan and turned them into glowing, faceted masterpieces of light. _You cut away so much_, I said to him, and he answered, _You have to, or it won't be worth anything_.

Great chunks of that dark blue gem of my memory were cut away or ground to dust, all those parts where I lay in the dark, bursting against my clothes, Christine's taste on my mouth mixing with Meg's, Christine's ring burning in my pocket while the rest of me burned in my trousers, and I thought, _She didn't want me, fine. Someone else does, and this one's nice, very nice. I've seen her for years; the two of them were virtually inseparable, like sisters. She's always been kind, even to Carlotta, even to that bitch of a prima ballerina who made fun of her for having a voluptuous body. I'm not a rapist. I'll ask her if she wants me first, and I won't abandon her if she does. If she doesn't want me, I'll take her to the Rue Scribe under cover of darkness, and that will be that. _

_It's not a matter of love,_ I told myself. _She'll have to accept that I don't love her, that I'll never love anyone again. However, it would be good to have a woman to look after me, to warm my bed at night, and if I can't have Christine, then this is the next best thing. This one actually wants me, unlike Christine. She'll slow me down getting out of Paris, but that can be managed._

Then she woke up all the way and kissed me, warmly, thoroughly, all through me, and her hand moved over my belly and below with purpose now, so that the sweetness of that roving hand on my flesh almost overcame me. But I checked myself in time, and when I held back the sea of my lust, my tongue loosened in my mouth, and for her I did what I never could with Christine. Before I accepted her surrender, I asked her if she wanted me.

When I finally did ask her if this was what she wanted, if I was what she wanted, and she breathed her "Yes" in the heart of the black earth, it was I who surrendered to her. Then her love and desire and devotion washed over me like a sea, and it was the blue heart of my surrender which remained in the navy depths of that tiny stone.

_They are just facts_, I think. _I'm not ashamed of them anymore, because she knew anyway, forgave me long ago, and still loved me. As I finally came to love her._

"Do you have memories like this too?" I ask, and she claps her hands in delight. I feel suddenly timid, as if I were asking her to disrobe in the middle of the Place de la Concorde, and I ask her if she will share her memory of that first time with me. She hands me a glowing ruby with a heart of fire. Into it I drop, and it's as if I live inside her skin.

She picked up my mask. Through the dropped curtain she charged off behind me. The arrow of her desire pinned me to the stone wall as I dragged her inside the hidden passage. I see my hated face through her eyes as she stroked my tears away with her hair, but to her my face wasn't hateful. She thought my mouth was beautiful, and traced its curves with her fingers, then explored the graced line of my jaw that sloped around to the tiny cleft in my chin. To her I was radiant and strong beneath the crust and the horror.

Her hand rested on my shoulder and through her I felt my strength and breadth. As blind at the beginning of our love as at the end, I never knew the intensity and purity of her desire. In her hand she held my mask, hatred for it rising like sparks from her fingers. Then tears come to my own eyes as the memory lies between us pulsing and naked, the memory of that moment when she tossed my mask into the gorge beneath the rope bridge.

Her refrain surged through me, _Let me stay, please, let me stay_. I felt my own kisses through her mouth, felt how I crushed her to numbness with my weight as I slept exhausted on her breast. When I woke in pitch blackness, into her body I went with that first rude blind shove. She opened to me, accommodated me, surrendered to me. She bled and winced, and exulted in my acrid, shuddering pleasure that took no heed of her pain.

_I would have had to kill her to make her leave_, I realize. She takes the gem of fire back with lowered eyes as a lacerating glory opens around her.

"We've seen the Alpha and the Omega," she tells me as she replaces her memory. "We've seen the beginning and the end."

The room has grown much larger, and the bed is a vast plain, with the delicately embroidered quilt a landscape of patchwork fields and groves. The gauze around the bed floats like ivory clouds.

"But that was back then," she says. "The beginning starts here if you want it to. And we can have children."

"What?" I exclaim, astonished, not understanding. It's impossible, incomprehensible. The punishments, the tortures that everyone expects are here after all, and this must be the start. It tears me with unfairness that she should suffer first instead of me. "It's not possible. How can that be?"

"Where do you think new souls come from?"

"The priests would say from God. Not that on earth I paid any attention to what they said."

"The priests are right," she replies. "But if we want, we can help make new ones."

"How?"

"If you lie with me. Yes, you can lie with me. Oh, look at your face, I don't think your jaw can drop any farther. Your mouth is so beautiful when it's open like that, did I ever tell you?"

"Only thousands of times," I reply, pulling my mouth shut.

"It curves just like a pink seashell, and your lower lip pouts right out. But listen. If you lie with me, then a soul will come into being. That soul will grow in me, and I'll labor to bring him forth, but not in sorrow. I'll bear him, nurse him at my breast, and we'll raise him in love. Then when he's ready to go forth on his own, he'll be born into a body of flesh, if not on earth, then on some other star where he's needed."

On the quilt below me a flock of sheep moves lazily from one green field to another.

"On some other star?" I breathe out. It's almost too much to take in at once. "Then Giordano Bruno was right?"

"Yes," she laughs. "There are men on other stars, but they don't look exactly like us. They're here, too. I want to meet them, don't you? Maybe we can some time. Anyway, I don't know why some souls go straight from the womb of Holy One to their earthly bodies, and others grow up here first before entering the flesh. Gariela didn't answer me when I asked her that. It's just part of the purpose, she said. Even as an angel she didn't fully understand it."

The quilted fields and forests below me seem very far away. Under us little clouds like white pillows float, and I think it would be pleasant for us to lie down on them, to feel them embrace us.

"Will you actually swell with a child?" I ask, batting at a little cloud with my hand. Instead of cold and wet, it's warm and puffy. "Would you feel him move inside you? It's astounding, I never would have imagined it."

"I couldn't believe it either. Can you imagine my surprise? It's when I knew that I was really in heaven. My aunt would always tell me as a little girl, 'Heaven is the fulfillment of our heart's greatest desires.' She always looked so solemn when she said that, and eventually I forgot about it. What could a sweet powdery old nun like her know about the heart's greatest desire?"

"Obviously a lot," I say, starting to tremble as the whole landscape of possibility opens up beneath me.

(_The End_)


End file.
